Sparking Peace

By Teresa Kim Pecinovsky and Hannah Rose Martin, illustrated by Gabhor Utomo. Herald Press, 2025. 40 pages. $17.99/hardcover; $10.99/eBook.

Sparking Peace combines restorative justice and beating swords into plowshares—two themes well-loved among peace-church-affiliated publishers like Herald Press—in a story accessible to young children. It’s a sensitive story that offers a hopeful response to gun violence without ever mentioning or showing an actual gun. Gabhor Utomo’s realistic full-page illustrations frame the text to enhance both the feelings and actions of the story.

The authors are ordained ministers. Teresa Kim Pecinovsky serves as a healthcare chaplain. Hannah Rose Martin is a Mennonite pastor and reading teacher. Their story begins with a boy accidentally striking a soccer ball into his neighbor’s back window, breaking it. The boy’s father directs him to make restitution, and together with the neighbor, it is decided that he will help clean up the older woman’s backyard. Once the yard has been cleared, Miss Winifred comes up with the idea to plant a garden there.

The boy goes with his father to a community event where they watch while a blacksmith reshapes an unidentified object, hammering the glowing hot metal hard against the anvil. The boy sees the “sparks fly” and feels the pounding of the hammer in his body. The illustrations help us sense his experience of sound, heat, and light. He asks his father what the blacksmith is taking in and out of the forge. “It is something sad,” the father responds. “Something that breaks our hearts.” Several people attending the event take turns swinging the hammer, including Miss Winifred, who “begins to cry as she hits the metal.”

The final product is soon revealed; it’s a garden tool, “a shovel . . . [that] turns over dirt and helps bring new life.” The boy suddenly gets an idea: to give the tool to Miss Winifred, a moving gesture that brings boy and neighbor closer as they work together in her garden.

Sparking Peace was inspired by the nonprofit RAWtools, founded by blacksmith and Mennonite pastor Michael Martin, who is also the partner of coauthor Hannah Rose Martin. The organization collects guns (through donations) to then forge them into garden tools, offers nonviolence trainings, and organizes tool-making events like the one in the story (visit rawtools.org). The end pages of the book include information about RAWtools plus advice and queries for helping young people discuss and process gun violence. It’s enough for a First-day school lesson.

For more about blacksmiths following the biblical directive to beat swords into plowshares, we suggest the book Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence by Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin, which we reviewed in the August 2019 issue of Friends Journal. For a wonderful illustrated story on restorative justice and gardening for older children, we recommend The Summer My Father Was Ten by Pat Brisson (Astra Young Readers, 1999).

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Tom and Sandy Farley are members of Palo Alto (Calif.) Meeting’s San Mateo Worship Group. They are storytellers, theater-teaching artists, volunteer booksellers with Earthlight, coauthors of the Earthcare for Children curriculum, and gardeners.